


Can't Spell Survival without (YO)U!: Making the Most of the End of the World, From Your Friends at City Hall

by gloss



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Apocalypse, Community: apocalyptothon, F/M, Sweetums, besties, cannibals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-13
Updated: 2011-08-13
Packaged: 2017-10-22 14:23:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leslie's not going to take the end of the world lying down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Can't Spell Survival without (YO)U!: Making the Most of the End of the World, From Your Friends at City Hall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ishie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/gifts).



> Takes place before the season finale, "Lil' Sebastian" (3x16), around the time of "The Bubble" (3x15). Thanks to G. for lots of encouragement and beta help.

Over the course of their lunch, just three pigeons had dropped from the sky, thudding off the edge of their table and bouncing on the ground. Leslie counted that as a win, no question, but Ben remained disconcerted. He was even getting that little dimple at the start of each eyebrow

Ann was a native and kept on devouring her club sandwich like nothing was wrong.

Because nothing was. The sun was shining, the breeze only had the *slightest* frigid edge to it, plus the sweetest tang to its aftertaste. Today was Maple Cherry Popover day at Sweetums.

Nothing like spring in Pawnee.

"Guys! Guys, this is *great*. Isn't this great?" Leslie fixed her posture ( _straight as a rifle barrel_ , her mom liked to call it) and clapped her two best friends in the world on their shoulders.

"Grlbrnt!" Ann replied enthusiastically, then covered her mouth with her hand.

"Yeah," Ben said slowly. The man could put more weight and uncertainty into that single stretched-out syllable than most people could get into a soliloquy with thesaurus at hand. "Yeah, this is --" He nudged aside the most recent pigeon corpse with his toe and shuddered delicately. "This is great."

Leslie drove her elbow into his side. Maybe she was a little rougher than she'd meant, because he let out an unsettling squeak and doubled over; maybe – more likely – he was just being a big baby.

"Well, I'm sorry," Ben said, pushing away his lunch. "Birds are falling out of the sky, it's a good twenty degrees colder than normal, and no one seems to --"

"Spring in Pawnee," Leslie replied and grinned. Ann nodded, tugging her sweater more snugly around her shoulders.

"Care or notice," he finished. "No one seems to care."

"There's nothing like it," Leslie said.

"Yeah, that's what I --" Ben broke off and tilted his head. "Wait, what?"

Leslie's phone rang.

"Is that '99 Problems'?" Ann leaned over. "Your ringtone is '99 Problems'."

"My federal line," Leslie said. "USARNorth."

"I've never even seen that phone before."

"It's never rung before," Leslie replied. "Well, once, but that was a kid pranking random numbers from Prague."

"The Czech Greg Pikitis?" Ann grinned.

Her hair blew back off her face; she chased it with her hand and, right there, in the pale light and stiff breeze, she'd never looked lovelier. Leslie wanted to memorize this moment, stop time, never move from right now.

"Or Slovak, yes," Leslie said after a bit.

The phone kept ringing.

"Federal? Like the President?" Ben asked.

"No, silly, that's 'Imagine' by John Lennon."

"CIA?"

"'Back in Black'," she said.

"State Department?"

"'Nothing Like a Dame', South Pacific. Used to be 'I Am Woman', but that then we saw the show in Muncie and --" Leslie stopped herself and took a deep breath.

"Are you okay?" Ben asked.

"Yeah, you look --" Ann touched Leslie's forehead with the back of her hand. "Freaked."

Leslie gripped her knees and bent over, huffing the air out of her lungs in what she thought was Lamaze breathing. She had to calm down.

Her phone rang again. This time it was the Jackson Five, "Goin' Back to Indiana".

"Leslie?" Ben asked. He sounded hushed and cautious and, somehow, very far away.

Leslie looked up and blinked hard. "That's my state line. I should take federal first, right? Federal takes priority, it's probably in the Constitution, I should know that, right? What do I do?"

"Federal," Ben said. He was humoring her, it was obvious, but she was so grateful for that she could kiss him, right here in the courtyard, in front of Chris Traeger and Kyle the Mope and God and everybody. "Unless the UN calls."

The sun seemed to dim. Maybe it had been getting darker for a while, but she was only just noticing it. "No, that's 'I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke' --"

"Leslie," Ann said firmly. "Answer it."

Everything froze . The sky was dark. A crow dropped on the table and bounced away. Leslie couldn't breathe. She felt about three inches tall and wanted to be even smaller. "No," she said softly. "I don't wanna."

Ann handed her the phone. She wore her best nurse's face, the one that brooked no disagreement, the one that meant rectal thermometers and booster shots and tine tests.

Leslie answered the phone. She heard the click of a line engaging, then disengaging, engaging again, and an electronic voice recording reading off alphanumeric codes. Suddenly a human voice cut in, harried, gasping: "– all over they're – it's --"

"All over," Leslie echoed. Rising, she grabbed Ben and Ann by the hands. She found herself in motion, not speaking, merely pushing forward, on and on, until they were inside, rushing down the hall, and Ben and Ann were yelling at her, trying to slow her down.

"EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY! CITIZENS OF PAWNEE, TAKE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL," Leslie bellowed.

She pulled them after her around the far corner, through one doorway, then another, until they were clattering down metal steps into the damp gloom of the third sub-basement.

"What -- you -- going --"

She heard them, saw their faces twisted in confusion and fear, felt them tugging at her, but there wasn't time. There might not ever be time.

*  
The sky flashed violet, then expanded to a deep, bruised darkness. Derek and Ben were sleeping in after driving all the way to, then back from, Aurora, Illinois for a Scott Joplin-themed flash mob and missed the sight. But when a series of explosions cascaded through the Sweetums plant up the road – they were living in the heart of Pawnee's (tiny) industrial district, both for social cachet and because warehouse landlords didn't do credit checks – they tumbled off the futon onto the poured concrete floor.

Ben smacked his head as he tried to sit up. His entire arm shaking, he reached for Derek.

For half a second, the light was so weird that he thought Derek's eyes were glowing purple. *All* of his eyes, iris and whites. He shook his head, hard, and croaked out Derek's name.

Derek sprang at him, teeth bared, fingers curled like claws, and started eating.

*  
Perd Hapley was just finishing up his DVD Pilates session when the sky flared and his television set exploded. He dropped to his knees and crawled across his condo's cluttered floor.

The shower of sparks caught on the raffia rug and set it afire.

*  
"This is the most fun I've had with my clothes on in years!" Brandi Maxx was well into an exclusive interview with Joan Calamezzo about her first novel when the studio electricity cut out.

Suddenly, Joan's face blurred. It sounded like she was hacking up a lung or retching her stomach lining. Brandi pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to remember how many appletinis she had had with lunch, when Joan's eyes started to shine purple and her whole posture changed.

"This is the opposite of fun!" Brandi yelled as she kicked off heels and vaulted over the decorative side table.

Joan gave chase, growling and slavering all the way.

*  
Even in bucolic Eagleton, the shockwave scrambled every electrical circuit and overloaded the transformers.

The cognitive rewiring was less noticeable at first, thanks to the townspeople's stiffly-maintained standards of WASP repression and J.Crew-styled coldness.

But when Rotary president Kermit Prescott-Delaney looked up from his Cobb salad, he found his secretary, Honora Farragut, stripped to the waist and howling at the ceiling. He shoved away the salad and clambered atop his Arts & Crafts desk to join her.

Soon, they would hunt.

*  
When Ben came to, Ann was crouched next to him, checking his pulse. They were still in the basement, a part of City Hall he had never seen before. Emergency lights sent wan spikes into the gloom, where they were swallowed up, extinguished.

"What?"

"Ssh," Ann said and released his wrist. "Just stay still."

From the darkness ahead of them, he heard rustling and banging, almost like the noise of a high-school locker room, soon joined by Leslie's voice. "This is unacceptable! This is --" Another bang, and a moment later she appeared in the pale light. "This is unbelievable, this is all my fault."

She tossed a gas mask at Ann and a few slips of paper at Ben. One drifted onto his chest. He squinted at it; the letters swam, then solidified. "'I owe you one case of Surviv-a-yums'. What're Surviv-a-yums?"

"Only our last best hope," Leslie said. She slumped down next to Ben and pulled her knees up to her chest. While he was out – how long had that been? – she had changed into what looked like hunting gear, camouflage pants and a flak jacket.

Ben glanced at Ann. She scratched the back of her neck. "Aren't they just Nutriyums repackaged for the crazy survivalist crowd?"

"Yes," Leslie said. She had her head tilted back, gaze fixed on the darkness. She spoke without looking at them. "That's what I said. Keep reading. There's a *million* of those things, practically."

Ben sifted through the notes. Some were written on phone message pad paper, some on the back of printer test pages. A few were on heavy bond, smooth to the touch, embossed with someone's ornate initials. "'Hey sugar bear, I owe you one water-filtration kit and surplus tubing. Grey Goose quality from dollar store swill, here I come! JR.'"

"Jean-Ralphio?" Ann suggested.

Leslie groaned.

Ben read the next few notes. "'I owe you three gas masks, Tom H.' 'I owe you a baker's dozen flares, Jerry.' What is this?"

"I'm municipal disaster and large-scale emergency manager," Leslie said.

"You are?" Ben struggled to sit up all the way. "I think I would know that."

"It's not in the budget any more."

"Way to go, dude!" Ann turned on Ben. "Just when I start to think you're okay."

He raised his hands. "Hey, I wouldn't cut --"

"No, this is earlier," Leslie said. "When disaster management got slashed, I kind of took it on myself."

"Oh, Leslie," Ann said. "You didn't."

"Yeah. I did." She looked up then, her eyes narrow, her face pale and tight. With her hair awry, she looked all of ten or twelve years old, fragile and tense. Out of habit, Ben stifled the urge to put his arm around her.

Then again, they *were* alone down here.

He started to slide his arm around her shoulder, but Leslie shrugged him off.

"C'mon," Ben said. His throat hurt, his head pounded. "C'mon, it's okay --"

Leslie sat up straight and pushed her hair out of her eyes. "Not cuddle time, Wyatt." She snapped her fingers in front of his nose. "Come on. Stay with me."

"I don't have a concussion --" Ben stopped when she raised her hand again, threatening another snap. "Right, hands to myself."

For years now, it seemed, Leslie had been keeping the City Hall fallout shelter stocked as well as she could out of her own pocket. For nearly as long, her coworkers had been helping themselves when the need struck.

"And it's my fault," Leslie concluded, her face pinched and shoulders hunched up around her ears. "I should have checked the stocks, added to the inventory, but first there was the shutdown and then the Harvest Festival..."

"So what you're saying is, it *is* Ben's fault," Ann said.

"Hey!"

"Or Chris's," she added. Then, faintly, "Kidding. I was just kidding. Trying to lighten the – forget it."

"These IOUs only account for a fraction of what's missing." Leslie's voice was too loud for the claustrophobic darkness. "There were tarps, those cool NASA blankets that look like tin foil, cans of kerosene, so much. All of it gone without a trace."

"Maybe they'll turn up," Ann suggested, her tone bright and false.

"Sure and maybe I'll be a delegate at the next G8 Summit," Leslie replied. "Oh, wait, no. _There's never going to be a G8, or anything else, again._ "

"What's going on?" Ben asked. The question had to be asked, but as soon as he spoke, it sounded stupid. Pointless. It had been in the air, dimming the lights, creeping down their spines, scraping raw their throats.

Speaking it was superfluous.

*

As they picked their way outside, through the mess of City Hall, there were no sirens, no screams, no sound except the occasional bone-chilling howl. People wandered in every direction, eyes squinted up against the strange light, bodies tensed against blows that did not come.

They found Andy at the shoeshine stand. He'd been taking a nap, and didn't realize anything was wrong. Chris had run off, someone said, but did not elaborate. April was hiding under her desk, desperately punching the keys on her broken cell phone; there was no trace of Tom.

No one had seen Ron, but that was typical. Some weeks he managed to come and go undetected for days at a time.

There was no electricity in the building. When they reached the courtyard, Kyle from the City Clerk's office told them that no cars would start, either.

No one was hurt seriously; most people were banged up, complaining, like Ben, of a headache or the strangely bright light. Ann was almost disappointed; if she weren't needed here, that meant she needed to go to work.

"I should go to the hospital, right?" Ann wrapped her arms around herself and looked around. "That's what I should do."

They found a bicycle upended at the entrance to the parking lot, as if it had been dropped, its rider sprinting away on foot. Ben righted it and held the handlebars while Leslie took Ann by the shoulders.

"Be careful," she said. "Don't take unnecessary risks."

Ann could have pointed out that riding a bike into the acrid, smoky, semi-apocalyptic unknown constituted the definition of an unnecessary risk, but she bit her lip and nodded. She had to turn off her brain, stop second-guessing, and just *do*. This was exactly what she was trained to do.

Their eyes watered and neither could quite draw a full breath as Leslie and Ann hugged goodbye.

"Take this," Leslie said, kicking a knapsack toward the bike. "You know, for supplies. There's a first-aid kit in the side pocket. And this --" She flipped open a huge sheath and shook out a seriously scary-sharp hunting knife. "You know. Just in case."

Ann cupped the sheath in her palm. "Uh, I --"

"Just like a scalpel!" Leslie said more loudly than was necessary. "Think of it as a scalpel! For, uh. Someone who doesn't want surgery." She pasted on a big smile; Ann swallowed again. Through the foul, bitter smoke she tasted salt.

She pedaled quickly out of the parking lot and coasted down the incline to Route 87. Several cars littered the road and shoulder, angled crazily, their doors open, drivers milling around restlessly.

"Go to City Hall," she shouted as she wove between the bumpers. "Is anyone hurt?"

"What happened?" A woman with a baby in her arms tried to grab Ann by the arm. "The car just _turned off_ , how is that possible, what happened?"

Ann tucked her chin in and pedaled faster. "Go to City Hall, they'll help you out."

That wasn't exactly true, but she didn't know what else to say.

Making her way slowly, wobbily, down the highway, she stopped to help three people along way -- an old man having a panic attack, a younger dude who claimed he'd pulled his groin and needed her to feel how hard it was, and a nice woman who'd bashed her forehead on her steering wheel. The cut was bleeding copiously, but it was shallow and easily bandaged with the first-aid kit in the next car.

She could do this. This -- whatever was happening, whatever had occurred -- was just like every other day at bottom. She had to stay calm, listen, and help. Maybe that wouldn't be easy, but it definitely was not impossible.

Her calves had started to burn and she was breathing through the neck of her shirt, tugged up over her mouth and nose, by the time the hospital access road came into view. The knapsack on her back kept sliding around and the knife, strapped to her leg, felt like a stone dragging her to the side.

Ann skidded to a stop, dragging her toes in the dirt. She drove this way every day, often several times a day, between the hospital and City Hall, yet even if the sky weren't filled with oily clouds and the entire town beset with eerie silence, something would have felt very different.

A kid – no, a young guy, just skinny, about her height – careened around the bend and ran toward her, shouting unintelligibly, waving his arms like a windmill. Ann got tangled into the bike, cuff caught on a pedal, but she managed to catch him.

His eyes rolled. Globules of spit caked his lips and streaked his chin.

"Hey, hey, hey," Ann said in her best soothing tone. "Easy there, fella, come on."

"Are you one of them?" he demanded. "You're one of them!"

He twisted free from her grip, tried to run, but stumbled and sagged, falling to his hands and knees.

"Hey --" Ann crouched next to him. When he looked up at her, she saw the wound on the side of his neck: it gaped open, meaty and bloody all at once, like some of the worst dog bites she had seen. "Oh, okay. Okay."

She ripped the sleeve off her shirt and wadded it up to press on his neck while she tried to help him lie down.

"No, no," he kept saying, "we have to go, they're coming --"

"Sssh," she told him, automatically, out of habit. It was standard practice to soothe the panic and concentrate on the physical symptoms, but something told her to take him seriously. "Sorry. Who? Who is coming?"

He shook his head, clutching the rag to his neck and pulling her toward the bike. "Come on, we have to *go* --"

Now she remembered who he was: April Ludgate's ex, or her ex's boyfriend, or whatever their polyamorous hipster arrangement had been. Bob? Darren? "What's your name?"

"Ben," he said, his jaw tight and sharp in the unearthly light. "Come *on*. They're eating people!"

Somehow, she wrestled him up onto the handlebars and then, biting her lip, praying to a God she hadn't consulted since her mom died, straddled the seat and pushed off. The kid was probably delirious, that was all. He'd gotten cut, he was scared, he'd say anything to keep moving.

Ann maneuvered the bike in a wide, teetering arc and set back toward City Hall.

"He just woke up and *bit* me," Ben was saying. "And I ran, and ran, and --"

Something howled behind them. Ann pedaled faster, making for the relative safety of the traffic jam. Out of the corner of her eye, streaking along the shoulder of the road, she could have sworn she saw a cheetah.

An elephant trumpeted in the distance, and then the all-too-human howl joined it.

*  
People came to City Hall all afternoon. Most of them came alone. Even gathered together in the council chambers, they each sat alone. They came with terrible stories: there was a fire out of control on the east side of town, another raging at Sweetums; some claimed that zoo animals were running loose, others that zombies were taking to the streets.

Leslie did not have a section in her binder for any of these eventualities.

"What do I do? What do I do?"

Ben wanted to rub her shoulders, which were up around her ears, but knew better than to risk any kind of PDA.

"Phones are out, no electricity, no cars," he said.

"I know," she snapped. "I sent Andy to the fire station, but they're volunteers, Ben. And don't their hoses use electricity?"

"I imagine their pumps do, yes."

She dropped her head on her desk and groaned. Her binder cut into her cheek; when she turned her head, she saw that it was open to a title page. "Priorities," she said slowly, tasting the word, drawing it out. She straightened up, her eyes wide, and grabbed Ben by the arm. "Priorities!"

He waited.

"The effective emergency manager is able to think outside the box and reorganize priorities as needed," Leslie said, as if quoting one of the manuals arrayed around the room. Her excitement almost crackled in the air around them. "What are our priorities, Ben?"

"Um..."

"Work with me!"

He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Help people out. Keep 'em safe?"

"Bingo!"

They rousted Tom out of his hiding place in the second-floor ladies washroom; Jerry was dispatched to the cafeteria to take stock of the food supplies. Leslie gathered an armful of zoning maps of the city, told Ben where to find a box of golf pencils embossed with "Happy Big 2-0, Lil' Sebastian!", and hurried to council chambers.

Her energy did not find a welcome audience. For people who looked so exhausted, they were a surprisingly fractious bunch. They all wanted answers, and right away.

"We're all worried," Leslie told them. "Believe me, we are."

"Who the hell are you?" one woman called out.

Leslie saluted her crisply. "Leslie Knope, Parks and Recreation and Emergency Management."

"What's going on?" someone else yelled.

"We..." Leslie glanced at Ben, but all he could do was nod encouragingly. "We don't know. Your guess is as good as mine."

"Aliens!"

"Muslims!"

"Asteroids!"

She held up her hands. "Now, now, is that as important as the fact that we're all here? We need to look *forward*, not --"

"Aliens riding asteroids!"

She smiled patiently. "Possibly. Until we know for sure, why don't we try to concentrate on --"

A stoop-shouldered man stood up and pointed at Ben and Leslie accusingly. "Who's in charge here? Where's Gunderson?"

Ben touched Leslie's shoulder. She glanced up at him, gratitude naked on her face and in her eyes. "I'll take that. Mayor Gunderson and several councilors are on a junket to Pawnee's sister city, Boraqua --"

"Mexicans?" another woman asked. "This is the Mexicans' fault?"

Ben swallowed. No way could he let *that* line of inquiry continue. "Venezuela, as a matter of fact. They're there to strengthen the bonds of friendship. Which is something that Ms. Knope can speak to, a little closer to home. Leslie?"

"Thank you, Mr. Wyatt," she said smoothly and stepped forward. "Friendship! We're all friends here."

"Says you," muttered the alien theorist as he crossed his arms.

"I just want to know what's going on," a white-haired woman called. "What's going on? What aren't you telling us?"

"Typical government types," the stoop-shouldered guy said loudly, "cashing their paychecks while the little guy gets left out in the cold."

"It *is* cold out there," the white-haired lady said, as if this were breaking news. "Why is this happening?"

Leslie looked down, as if to check notes that weren't there. Ben realized that she was composing herself; the sight was difficult to bear. After a moment, Leslie looked up and met the woman's gaze. Her jaw looked tight, her eyes were narrowed, but somehow she maintained her pleasant, friendly tone. "Ma'am, I honestly don't know. I'm just asking that those of us who can, pitch in. Help out, help each other, until we get this sorted out."

"When will that be?" a late arrival called from the back.

As Leslie lifted her chin, her hair fell back from her face. She looked almost regal as she stood there, waiting for the latest round of murmurs to die down.

"I've got maps of town. I'm asking anyone who can help to take one and check out the homes near their own."

The audience didn't like that suggestion very much. "You can't tell us what to do" mingled with "Who do you think you are?" and "I'm not your errand boy". Anger and worry made them all look ugly, tense and stubborn.

"And, when you're finished, gather essentials and return here," Leslie concluded, raising her voice just enough to be heard.

They didn't like that idea very much, either. No two-bit bureaucrat was going to keep them prisoner, take away their possessions, et cetera et cetera. Ben bit his lip, then the inside of his cheek, and finally had to cross his arms and pinch himself in the armpits to keep from yelling his head off at them all.

In the end, several people sheepishly took maps and left. Leslie retreated to her office; Ben hung back, straightening up the dais and stacking chairs.

*  
Halfway back to City Hall, with Ben heavy against her, Ann heard the guttural roar of motorcycle. She could not hope to outpedal it, so she coasted to a stop.

The motorcycle, complete with sidecar, drew up beside her. "You need some help, ma'am?"

It was Ken Hotate, his voice slightly muffled by the big helmet he wore.

"I need to get back to City Hall," Ann said. She didn't have much choice, so she decided to trust him. "This kid's banged up and pretty delirious."

"No, I'm not!" Ben protested. "I'm telling you the truth."

“Cannibals,” Ken said gravely. “He's not lying.”

In the sidecar, television personality Perd Hapley slumped over. He looked up blearily and tried to make room for them. "This reporter does not like being part of the story."

Ann nodded sympathetically and helped Ben into the sidecar. He ended up with one leg over Perd's lap in order to fit.

"I'll bike it," she told Ken. "Just...stay in sight?"

Nodding, he squeezed her shoulder, then gunned the engine. They made their way past the now-abandoned cars and up toward City Hall. When they'd dropped off Perd and Ben, with hurried explanations to Leslie, Ann took the sidecar. Ken drove recklessly fast, but the speed, the wind on her face, the fear that whitened her knuckles, were all welcome distractions from the dread that would not stop growing.

The Rexall pharmacy on Eighth Street was already looted. Ann wasn't surprised; Pawnee residents were slow to stir, unless there was something in it for them. Ken covered her while she stepped over the broken glass into the dark store.

She checked the pharmacist's inventory, but it had been cleared out. Still, she could fill several bags and her knapsack with gauze, peroxide, and bandages. The dark was even creepier than she had feared; every crackle and thud made her jump inside her skin.

Whenever she blinked, she saw the wound on Ben's neck.

She clutched the bags to her chest as she rejoined Ken outside. "Let's go."

*

At first, City Hall was merely a convenient gathering point. Leslie was there; there was food from the cafeteria and a constant trickle of citizens coming in and out with news, rumor, and gossip.

After the lion attacks in Ramsett Park, as the predation by the cannibals in the southwest kept increasing, the population staying at City Hall grew. They were lucky that the zoo animals were between the building and the cannibals, but "lucky" was a very relative term these days.

Leslie held info-sessions every morning, even on mornings when there was nothing to report. She maintained that routine and transparency were more necessary than ever, but the sessions were invariably raucous and argumentative. The refugees clung to magical thinking, insisted that if someone (they never settled on who) just tried hard enough, everything could go back the way it was.

You couldn't blame them for that.

Well, Ben blamed them, and Tom, when he paid attention, and probably April, too, since she hadn't had the highest opinion of her fellow human beings to start with. Andy was more forgiving, but didn't bother to say so most of the time.

But Leslie didn't blame them. After Andy's old nemesis Lawrence threatened to toss her to the Sweetums cannibals, she just took a step back and held up her hands. She gave them all, herself included, a five-minute timeout. She'd been watching a lot of Supernanny before the crisis, and the show's lessons were proving surprisingly effective at these town meetings.

Was it a town meeting, Ben asked a couple times, if there was no more town?

Leslie did not devote much time to semantics.

When the timeout was over, she hopped off the dais and took a seat next to Lawrence. No more sitting apart, no more authority: she realized that they were all in this together. She said as much and Lawrence snorted.

"No, hear me out," Leslie persisted. "It's like the Blitz. We've got to be here for each other, or what're we doing?"

She didn't have an answer for that question. She had to trust that they'd all figure it out together, day by day.

*  
Three days later, a salvage squad going through a subdivision on the west side of town disturbed a nest of purple-eyed cannibals. One survivor made it back to City Hall before he died later that night.

They couldn't pass this off as gossip any longer.

*

The team, such as it was, had gathered in what had been Leslie and Tom's office. Now it looked a lot like a military field headquarters, with maps tacked up over Leslie's beloved portraits, several shotguns leaning against the walls, and Ben's yellow legal sheets drifting everywhere.

(*They* didn't look very impressive, to be sure. Tom was ashen; April even more catatonic than usual, and Andy kept looking around with big saucer-round eyes, like he expected the walls to cave in any minute.)

"There are zombies?" Tom's voice squeaked. "Zombies."

"Technically," Ben said, "they're not zombies. Zombies are reanimated corpses."

"They're eating people," April put in without looking up from the floor. "That's zombies."

Andy nodded, his eyes saucer-wide. "I'm plus oneing that."

Ben pressed his lips together, then, when he felt a little calmer, said, "That's cannibalism. You don't need to be a zombie to be a cannibal."

"Nerd," Tom said, but the familiar accusation was listless, more habitual than passionate. "You are such a nerd."

"I just like accuracy," Ben said helplessly. He stacked, then restacked, his notes and the maps that had been turned in. "I --"

Ann returned then, nudging open the door with her hip; her arms were full of stacked blankets topped with two grocery sacks full of scavenged supplies. "No, don't worry," she muttered, "I've got it."

She tripped over April's outstretched legs; Andy tried to help but ended up knocking the bags to the floor. The blankets landed on top of them as Ann caught herself against the edge of a desk.

"Sorry!" Andy handed her a box of Band-Aids, the only thing he had managed to catch.

Ann just shook her head, then addressed Ben. "Where's Leslie?"

Ben rubbed his neck. "Breaking the news to the citizens."

"Alone?" Ann demanded. "Why --"

The sound of yelling broke in then, accompanied by the thud of thrown furniture and high-pitched shrieks. The couple kids in the makeshift daycare room across the hall peered around the doorway, elbowing each other. The hub-bub got louder; Leslie's voice was faint, desperate, in its growing tumult.

Ann glared at Ben. She had a point.

"She said she could handle it!" Ben protested.

"Dude," Ann said as Ben stood up and they rushed into the hallway together. "What she thinks she can handle is not the same as --" Her words were cut off by the wail of an infant and a man's voice bellowing invective.

*

"I don't get it," Ben kept saying, shaking his head and flipping through his notes and the annotated maps. They'd narrowed down where the cannibals tended to live, but that was small consolation compared to the breadth of their ignorance. Why were newer cars as dead as the rest of the electrical appliances? Older machines could still be started, so long as they didn't run out of available gasoline. Two gas stations near the interstate had exploded last week, however, and more were sure to follow.

No one knew what happened at Sweetums; no one had survived its explosions. At least, none of its survivors had made it to City Hall.

Three lions prowled Ramsett Park; bears were settling in the bandshell as well as the feed store on Whyte Avenue.

Ben stared at his notes, at his maps, then down to his palms. "I just don't get it."

Ann wrung out another compress over the makeshift basin. "What's to get?"

Sighing, Ben opened his arms, indicating everything at once, nothing in particular. "Don't you want to know? What happened, why --"

"No," Ann said flatly. She swabbed out Gay Ben's wound, then glanced back up. "I want clean water. Antiseptic. I want some painkillers, and pillows, and maybe even a little help. That's what I want."

"Right, of course. But --" Ben looked down at the scattered maps. "Sorry. I just don't get it."

"That's because," Ann said, standing up and helping Gay Ben (they really should not be calling him that, she blamed herself for that) out the door, "there's nothing *to* get, jackass!" Her voice grew louder with each word, until she slammed the door on the last syllable and the frosted glass shuddered in its frame. "Shit happens and you can try to help or you can stand around with your thumb up your ass and whine --"

"Third option," Ben said, squinting a little. "You can play out your martyr complex and hope someone falls for it! Fun for precisely no one!"

"Okay!" Leslie slid between them, hands up and big cheery smile plastered on her face. "Let's break this party up, shall we?"

"I'm good," Ben said.

"I'm better," Ann said quickly.

"We're all good, how's that?" Leslie pushed Ben away, gently, and called, over his shoulder, "Hey, Tom? Why don't you come help Ann?"

Tom had been reading the same issue of **GQ** for days now. He did not look up from its well-thumbed pages. "No can do. Don't like blood."

"So why don't you give Ben a hand?"

"Nah," Tom replied.

"Tom..."

"Paperwork's never been my thing," Tom said after perusing a two-page ad for cologne with the care a medievalist might pay to the corner of an illuminated manuscript. "You know that."

*

It was Leslie's turn to change out the rain barrels. She was dragging a Rubbermaid container, decorated with some kid's old flaking stickers of Space Shuttles and stallions, taking care not to let the water slop too much, backwards to the cafeteria's freight entrance when she backed right into someone.

"Coming through!" she said, but the person didn't move.

"Leslie," her mother said.

Her back twinged alarmingly as Leslie straightened up. She passed a hand over her hair and tugged down her safety-vest before turning around. "Hey, Mom, what gives?"

Marlene seemed unruffled by all the stress of the past weeks. "Lindy Dexhart has an RV and two horses. We're setting out east tomorrow."

"Ew, Dexhart the perv?" Leslie said before she'd processed the rest of what she heard.

"No," Marlene said; to anyone else, she might have sounded patient, but Leslie knew better. She had already used up the majority of her mother's goodwill on one stupid remark. "Bill was down south with Gunderson, you know that."

"Right, right." Sweat covered Leslie's face and she tried to wipe it off, but stopped herself. "Good riddance, I say."

Marlene tipped her head in the very best noncommittal style of the practiced civil servant.

Leslie did not even know how to spell noncommittal.

"Wait, you're leaving? You can't leave!"

Marlene blinked against the grit on the wind. "Leslie, listen to me. You're coming with us."

There were four women capable of making Leslie feel insignificant, incompetent, and like a fraud. Recent events aside, neither Bella Abzug nor Eleanor Roosevelt was likely to rise from the grave any time soon, and Madeline Albright, like the rest of US government, was AWOL.

That left her mother.

"I appreciate your enthusiasm," Marlene continued. "You know I've always remarked on just how...enthusiastic you can be."

Leslie swallowed against the hollowness in her chest. "Please stay. I think you could really contribute. We're all doing our part --"

"Like the Blitz," Marlene said, passing a hand over her eyes as if the phrase itself wearied her. "Yes, you've mentioned that many times."

"Like the Blitz, yes!"

Marlene squeezed Leslie's shoulder. The skin around her eyes looked soft, almost velvety in its wrinkles, as she leaned in. "The Blitz *ended*, sweetheart. This mess isn't like that."

Leslie tried to keep her voice calm. "C'mon, Mom. We're all pitching in. You're a teacher, there are --"

"I am an educational administrator," Marlene said.

"Administrator, schmadministator! Same diff. The point *is*, there are kids here, they could use --"

She drew herself up and squared her shoulders. "There is a difference, believe me. I don't like *children*. I never have."

Leslie bent over the container again and breathed out slowly through her open mouth. Her hands looked weirdly pale against the green plastic.

"You know what I meant," Marlene said after a long while. "Don't --"

"I'll miss you, Mom." Leslie curled her fingers around the edge and hefted it. Maybe she imagined it, but it sounded as if Marlene snorted at that. "I really will."

*

She was going to die alone.

Ann had never given much credence to the pop cultural idea that the prospect of being single and childless should terrify her more than anything else. Women's magazines were terrible, hysterical sources of ridiculous problems-that-weren't, like how to keep a man satisfied in bed and how to stop aging around age 25.

But here she was, pacing the hallways in the dead of night with a shotgun on her back and a kerosene lantern in her hand, and she was pretty sure that she was going to die alone.

Cosmo never offered 101 Hints for Outliving the Apocalypse; Mademoiselle and In Style weren't rushing to help her dress for success among the remnants of humanity.

When Ann set out on her rounds, Ben and Leslie were curled up in the little nest they'd made in Leslie's office from sleeping bags and couch cushions. Ben was asleep, arms around Leslie's waist; Leslie was sitting against the wall, knees up, reading by the wan wavering light of a candle. Her free hand drifted over Ben's head, touching his hair, tracing the curve of his ear.

Across the hall, April and Andy were fucking. Before Ann looked away, she saw April on top -- Andy had always really liked cowgirl, it meant far less work for him -- and long red scratches across April's back, glowing like coals.

Jerry and Mrs. Jerry were asleep on their backs, mouths open, snores like chainsaws.

It wasn't that Ann was the only solitary person here; despite temporary alliances and hookups, a lot of the City Hallers were alone.

She just...there wasn't any fair way to say it. She was alone and it sucked.

She was going to die alone. Any day now.

*

After asking around -- Tom was nearly nonverbal these days, Ann was nowhere to be found, and Marlene had left the day before, but April actually met his eyes when he asked and pointed to the ceiling, which Andy helpfully translated as "up on the roof or in Heaven, but probably roof" -- Ben found Leslie on the roof of City Hall.

She had a plaid wool hunting shirt wrapped around her tiny frame and her chin tucked into its up-turned collar. Against the smoky night sky, she huddled there, pale as marble.

"Always wanted to come up here," she said as he settled down next to her. She didn't seem surprised that he'd found her. "But Mayor Gunderson made it off-limits to everyone except Rufus and Evelyn."

"Mayoral dog park?" Ben asked. "That explains all the doo-doo bags, then."

Leslie laughed a little at that.

To the south, the hell that had been Sweetums still glowed green and purple, toxic but gorgeous. Most of the fires to the west had long since burned out, but pockets still flared. Everywhere he looked, the landscape was sunk in oily shadows, pocked with the occasional flame; the rubble lay in neat, scorched lots arrayed in perfectly straight, well-zoned lines.

Ben closed his eyes.

"They got another one today," Leslie said eventually. "The -- zombies, whatever. Andy said they got Lawrence."

"Which one was Lawrence?" He opened his eyes.

"Does it matter?" She shifted, turning to him. He could see Sweetums reflected in miniature across the wet surface of her eyes; her cheeks looked hollow.

"Well, yeah," Ben said. "It kind of totally does matter."

Leslie's smile emerged very slowly, but it finally caught and held. She nodded, then sighed and tucked her head against his shoulder. Ben slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her closer.

They sat there for a good half hour, Leslie curled into him, their fingers twined together, until Ben's teeth were chattering too loud to ignore. Regretfully, they pulled apart, kicking out the pins and needles, then helping each other stand. They walked slowly to the emergency door, weary and creaky as centenarians.

In the stairwell, Leslie took his hand again. "I like our cuddles."

He paused on the step below her and kissed the back of her hand. "Me, too."

"They're not going to solve anything, though." she continued. He wasn't sure if she'd heard him. They descended another floor before she spoke again. "We're running low on some of the food, we still haven't decided about the hunting --"

The group was divided about hunting the escaped zoo animals. Ben had yet to take a position, because as pragmatic as he liked to think he was, there was a large part of him that couldn't quite swallow the idea of eating zebra. Or otter.

As they neared the door to the fourth floor, Leslie quickened her step and passed Ben, leaving him behind. She had already disappeared around the next turn, leaving him in the dark, when the door opened. The darkness of the fourth floor was softer, half a shade brighter, then that of the stairwell.

Ben almost pissed himself.

He stumbled, staying upright solely because of his death-grip on the banister. A hand floated out of the darkness, beckoning him closer.

"Leslie..." Ben tried to call, but it came out as a croak. "Leslie?"

The hand dropped and an old lady stepped forward. She didn't look like a cannibal, but – that was the point, right? They could be you or me.

Ben flattened himself against the wall.

She tut-tutted and held up a plate, blue enamel, with beans and a hunk of bread on it. "Benjamin Thomas Wyatt, I'm not going to hurt you."

He had never seen this woman before. He was more sure of that than his own name, which she *also* knew.

Leslie made him jump all over again when she joined him on the landing; his bladder couldn't take much more of this.

"Muriel?" she asked.

"Leslie!" She smiled and offered Leslie the plate. "I was just trying to get Benjamin to eat. He's so *skinny*."

"Muriel, what are you doing up here?" Leslie passed the plate to Ben and leaned in as if to confide a terrible secret. "You know this is the *fourth floor*, right?"

Muriel made a strange hand gesture, a V or peace sign with both hands, then turned them on their side and interlocked them.

"Zorp," Leslie breathed and mirrored Muriel's sign, then hugged Ben and skipped down the stairs, calling over her shoulder, "Ben, you go with Muriel, it'll be fine, I promise! Everything's going to be fine!"

*

That wasn't quite true, Leslie knew, but she had not felt so optimistic in over a month. Muriel, like her mother, had been pretty high up in the Light of Zorp cult back in the 70s. If Leslie remembered correctly, Ethel and Muriel were right near the top of the hierarchy; Marlene had always deferred to them, and she deferred to precisely nobody. If the rumors were true -- if there were still LoZ stockpiles and caches hidden from view, known only to the adepts -- then maybe, just maybe, her people, those at City Hall, would be all right.

Maybe Ann would be her bestie again, maybe Ben would lose a little of that haunted glimmer in his eye. Maybe Leslie herself would be able to help rather than keep failing again and again.

And then she went and failed at optimism, too.

As soon as she got back to the first floor, everything got worse.

"KNO-OH-OH-PE!" The shout echoed down the hallway and rattled every window on the first floor. Everyone froze where they were; the sound came from somewhere deep and primal, a dark and close place, thick with blood and thunderous with need. "Knope!"

Leslie peeked out the window. It was too dark to make out much of anything beyond the presence of *something* there, something darker than the night, something very insistent.

She swallowed. She wished Ben were here, wished that Ann were, wished she were bigger and taller and stronger.

But she was none of those things, and she was alone right now. So she closed her fingers around the stock of her favorite gun and walked slowly toward the door.

The hunched, misshapen figure stood in the center of the courtyard. It was carrying something in both arms, something even bigger than it.

Leslie stepped forward. "You called?"

When it dropped its burden, the thing thumped hollowly on the concrete.

The figure, which was elevated on the left, lit a match, then dropped it. As it fell, the light showed that the figure was actually made up of two people. A small person, probably a child, had lit the match. The child sat on the shoulder of someone the size of a large man.

The match landed on the bundle at the man's feet and the smell of burning hair sizzled up for a few moments before the man ground it out with his toe.

"This is not a negotiation," the man said.

"Okay." Leslie swallowed again. Cold flashed over her skin, then heat, and dizziness threatened at the back of her skull. "So what can I do for you?"

Light glowed suddenly behind her, tossing her shadow before her, elongated so she looked as tall as Detlef Schrempf. It illuminated the bundle at the man's feet, revealing it to be an animal's body, wrapped in a rustling tarp.

Ann was the one carrying the lamp. Relief started to overwhelm Leslie, until she realized that Ann was not meeting her eye. She stopped beside Leslie and raised the lamp higher.

The man before them was Ron Swanson at his most Grizzly Adams – a full beard covered his face and tangled down his chest. It, like his hair, was shot through with white that had never been there before. On his shoulder was perched a small child, of indeterminate gender. More importantly than what its gender was, the kid had a sawed-off shotgun leveled at them. The child's hair was pulled back in short, spiky dreadlocks that stood around the skull like a sunburst, like the caricature of a halo.

"Ron," Leslie said, slow and calm, lest she spook their feral visitors, "who's your friend?"

He did not answer. Instead, he kicked the carcass at his feet. "Heard you had a lion problem."

"Something like that," Leslie said. "More a cannibal problem."

"Free human beings, formerly citizens of Pawnee --" Ron raised his voice and the child on his shoulder shot into the air. "I have a proposition for you."

"Hey, Ron," Leslie said, careful to keep her tone light and unthreatening, "would you like to come inside? Maybe talk at a normal volume like regular folks?"

He snorted. "Pshaw, woman. The time for that is long past. The time now --"

The child knocked Ron on the side of the head, making him break off; after they whispered fiercely back and forth, he dropped to one knee. The kid slid off, vaulting over the carcass and making a dash for the door. Leslie's every instinct told her to stop the child, but there was the gun to consider, plus god knows what kind of armory Ron was packing under the big black duster he wore. So she stepped aside and let the kid in.

"-- the time *now*," Ron continued, getting back to his feet, "is for survival."

"Uh-huh," Leslie said, as encouragingly as she could. What the hell did he think they were doing here? And just where had he been all this time? "About that, Ron. Your little buddy isn't going to be making a snack of my friends, is he?"

"She," Ron said. "And no. Lauren's just advance scouting."

That did not sound good.

"So what's your proposition?" Ann asked.

Startled, Leslie elbowed her, but Ann didn't even look over. She just cocked her head and waited for Ron's reply.

"Heh," Ron said and flapped out the tails of his coat before settling down in a squat. "It's an exclusive little offer for someone just like yourself."

"Like Ann?" Leslie asked.

"Yes," Ron said, slowly, almost lasciviously, and definitely creepily. "Like Ann. Like...April. Like --"

"Pretty dark-haired women," Leslie put in.

"Don't be hurt," Ron said. "It's not your fault you're towheaded with overly sharp features."

No one said anything for a bit. Ron cleaned his fingernails with a hunting knife; Ann took a seat at one of the tables, the lamp at her elbow. Leslie paced, wishing like hell that Ben would come back, before catching herself and hoping he would stay away until Ron left. If Ron were here to take people (and, no doubt, their supplies), then it would be best if he didn't know about the Zorp caches.

If the Zorp caches even existed; with their luck, Muriel probably was a high-functioning cannibal, digging into a delicious Ben Wyatt Buffet right now.

Leslie pinched her nose and willed the headache, with its attendance pessimism, into abeyance.

That only worked for a little bit. By the time evil little Lauren reappeared with April and other women in tow, with the rest of the City Hall residents bringing up the rear, Leslie was almost ready to give Ron whatever he wanted, so long as he left her in peace with a pillow and the last couple licorice whips.

Ron proposed to the free human beings, now unfettered from their chains of civic and social responsibility, that they return to his base camp in the woods between what had been Pawnee and Eagleton.

"There are no more boundaries now," he reminded them. "The only limits we face are those of our own courage and ambition."

"And wildlife," Leslie said. She couldn't help herself. She was tired and lonely and scared. "Also, zombies."

"They're not zombies," Andy said helpfully. "They're cannibals!"

"Son, they're nothing for us to worry about," Ron announced. That got the crowd excited; they probably believed he had a vaccine, or some kind of super-weapon, the kind of thing they had all pestered Leslie for in the early days. She didn't have the heart, or the will, to tell them that all Ron had was his arrogance and deep, abiding love for Ayn Rand and James Wesley Rawles.

"Can Andy come with me?" April asked. "If I go, which I might not, because it sounds like a pretty long walk."

"April!" Leslie said, shocked. "You're not going!"

"I dunno, maybe?"

"Can I?" Andy asked, excited as a kid on a snow day. "Can I, huh, Ron?"

"You're strong and a good worker," Ron said, magnanimity softening his gaze. "Of course you can."

"Why are you doing this?" Leslie said. "I mean, you don't have to tell me. I'm just a blonde with sharp features. But I'm curious."

"Leslie," Ron said, like he was explaining something as obvious as rainfall or mudpie making, "this is the Crunch. The fecal matter has encountered the fan. All bets, as they say, are off. And I am beholden to precisely two principles. One, I am driven to survive and flourish, as are all species, everywhere. But, secondly, and this is unique to man, I must also offer the hand of charity when I can. And, having set up camp near Eagleton, I now can do that."

"So you're doing this out of the goodness of your heart." Leslie found it hard to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

"In this particular moment," Ron said, at once stentorian and patient, "self-interest happens to coincide with charity. If you'd prefer that I leave, taking my offer with me, abandoning all these nice people, then why don't you just say so?"

"I'm not in charge here." Leslie turned to go back to her office, but not before trying to catch Ann's eye. It didn't work. "Everyone here decides for themselves."

"Bully for them," Ron said. "From what I've heard, it's like a midwestern Tahrir here these days. Cute, if pathetic and unworkable."

She waved goodbye without turning around. She couldn't watch the rest of the process; it hurt too much. They'd all lost enough, and leave it to the macho man of the backwoods to take the rest – to what ends, she was too tired and scared to guess. Ron might very well have been setting up some sort of *breeding camp* and militia. For all she knew, he'd been looking forward to this day for decades.

She pulled her overshirt more snugly around herself as she made her way down the main corridor to the farthest point from the courtyard. Behind her, the crowd's voices were still audible, but only as a low, irritating mumble, just like her headache.

She did not know whose turn it was to take watch. Since there was no one at the post, Leslie propped herself against the door, gun balanced on the windowsill, and waited for something even worse to happen.

*

Dawn came early these days. At first, the light snagged in the unearthly glow off Sweetums, remaining stained with chartreuse and violet for hours afterward. This morning, the clouds were piled high in the southeast, amassed like warships against some invisible, intimidating foe.

Leslie nodded awake; she did not quite remember being relieved of her watch last night, but she must have been, because she was back in her office, in her nest of blankets in the corner. When she tried to sit up, the sheets of paper on her chest crackled.

"Read them," someone -- Ben, she had to blink a lot before the slim shadow in front of her resolved into Ben -- said.

"Yeah," someone else said, next to her. Leslie rubbed her eyes and saw, unbelievably, Ann sitting crosslegged next to her.

"You guys..." Leslie finally managed to pull herself upright and unwind the flannel sheet around her chest. "Why are you here? Did everyone leave? Did you find the cache?"

"One thing at a time," Ann said, and exchanged a glance with Ben. A friendly glance, Leslie could have sworn, but that would have meant she was still dreaming. This was a nice dream, though. She liked this dream a lot. "Just read your notes, okay?"

"I'm dreaming," she murmured happily as she smoothed out the paper and squinted down. The sheet was folded in half; on the top flap, there were just four letters.

"We. O. U," Leslie read aloud. "Wait, that's not right --"

"I owe you," Ann said and Ben added, "And so do I, so. We."

"Aww, that's cute!" Leslie grinned at them both, unable to keep the happiness from flooding her every cell. "I want you two to be friends, I love you both so much --"

"Leslie," Ben said. "Just keep reading."

"Okay, okay. We owe you --" she opened the page. Inside, all it said was everything.

The paper trembled in Leslie's hands; she squeezed shut her eyes, but the tears stung and welled anyway. Her cheeks were hot, her throat was raw, and Ann was hugging her. She heard the creak of Ben kneeling and felt the hug double.

"You *guys*," Leslie managed to say, but they just hugged her more tightly.

She counted to one hundred by Indianas (like Mississippi, but better), then kissed their foreheads in turn before wriggling free.

"Okay, guys, cuddles later," she said as she got to her feet. Hands on her hips, chin up, she surveyed the room. "Let's get to work, huh?"


End file.
